Monday, June 22, 2009

A poem

Anticipation

Lying awake late at night
He found the darkness
And the silence — the aloneness —
Comforting. Faces appeared,
Familiar, dear, and he could bear
To look. He noticed
He was listening, alert
In mind and heart and soul.
He was not afraid.

5 comments:

  1. The ghost of Philip Larkin
    pressed my pallid hand,
    whispered, "Son, heaven is
    dull. Bring your iPhone."

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  2. I am surprised - though happy - to learn that Philip made it to heaven. Thanks for the comment. I wish others would comment that way. A dialectic in poems. What fun. And I wondered how others would react to that piece, which just occurred to me, as it were, the other night.

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  3. Susan B.7:51 PM

    Wow.

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  4. Anonymous3:11 PM

    Reminds me of Wallace Stevens' late poems, with an hint of Emily Dickinson - but the end result doesn't sound imitative, it's just itself - a good poem (which is rarer than one would suppose). i think what i like most - technical point - is the simplicity & everydayness of the vocabulary. i could give this to my Elementary students and they'd understand and (i think) like it. i do like baroque & weird words, but when simplicity is used well it has great, concentrated power.

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  5. I think I mentioned here before that, years ago, J.V. Cunningham sent me a letter after I had reviewed his Collected Poems, and told me that it was nice to be praised for the things one would like to be praised for. You have just praised me, elberry, for what I would most like to be praised for. So has Patrick in the in the link below. Susan, too, with great concision.

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